What if resilience was more than just bouncing back? Let's challenge the traditional understanding of this concept together where we dive into the complexity of resilience, arguing that it's not just about returning to a pre-crisis state - it's about transforming and evolving. We explore how resilience employs both mental and physical resources to promote recovery, using stress as fuel for action and finding methods to navigate adversity.
Let's take a journey through the world of resilience - it's not a destination, but a process that demands time, practice, and intention. We talk about the pivotal role of stress response, the importance of mindfulness, and how our body language communicates to our brain. We'll also talk about the significance of finding joy amid chaos and embracing change as part of life. This episode is all about putting you back in the driver's seat of your life and stress responses, equipping you with tools to build your resilience muscle.
Get in there and give it a listen for more!
Resources:
Manage Your Stress Mentorship
Discovery call
You can find more about Brain-Body Resilience and JPB:
On the BBR Website
On Instagram
On Facebook
Sign up for the BBR newsletter
What if resilience was more than just bouncing back? Let's challenge the traditional understanding of this concept together where we dive into the complexity of resilience, arguing that it's not just about returning to a pre-crisis state - it's about transforming and evolving. We explore how resilience employs both mental and physical resources to promote recovery, using stress as fuel for action and finding methods to navigate adversity.
Let's take a journey through the world of resilience - it's not a destination, but a process that demands time, practice, and intention. We talk about the pivotal role of stress response, the importance of mindfulness, and how our body language communicates to our brain. We'll also talk about the significance of finding joy amid chaos and embracing change as part of life. This episode is all about putting you back in the driver's seat of your life and stress responses, equipping you with tools to build your resilience muscle.
Get in there and give it a listen for more!
Resources:
Manage Your Stress Mentorship
Discovery call
You can find more about Brain-Body Resilience and JPB:
On the BBR Website
On Instagram
On Facebook
Sign up for the BBR newsletter
What is up? Hello there. My name is Jessica Paching Bunch, you can call me JPB, and this is Brain Body Resilience. This is a podcast dedicated to growth, human development and stressing a little bit less so you can go ahead and live a little bit more.
Speaker 2:Hello, my friends, welcome back to the Brain Body Resilience podcast. This is episode number 154. And I was looking back at previous episodes and I don't think I have dedicated an episode to resilience. And this is the Brain Body Resilience podcast. So here we go.
Speaker 2:You all know I love a good definition, if not just to make up my own afterwards. So a couple of definitions of this word. First, what does resilience mean? Psychological resilience here's one, one version. Psychological resilience is the ability to mentally or emotionally cope with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly.
Speaker 2:I don't love this. First of all, returning to pre-crisis state is problematic terminology because we can never go back to before something happens. It changes us forever, not necessarily in the same way forever, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. We continue to evolve in our experiences and emotions and attachment to things, expand, decrease, expand, evolve. We adapt, but experience changes us. So I don't love this one.
Speaker 2:Resilience here's a new one. Resilience exists when the person uses mental processes and behaviors in promoting personal assets and protecting himself from the potential negative effects of stressors. And with that one I did appreciate that one. I created my own definition composed of all of these things when I started this journey four years ago. I thought it was interesting to look back on what I wrote in this. My definition was using mental and physical resources to promote recovery and return to homeostasis, including, but not limited to, using stress to fuel action, finding tools to help navigate and cope with adversity, and learning the ability to continue forward after difficulty. Hi, I'm a robot Beep, beep, beep, beep. I still hold that same view, but my vocabulary has changed a bit over the years. Now I like to think of resilience as returning to the original state, and for us as humans, that means returning to balance, returning to curiosity, returning to trust in ourselves, returning to a place where our nervous system sends signals and we pay attention, like when we were children. Before we learned survival skills and socialization. Resilience involves behaviors, thoughts and actions that anyone can learn and develop. It is about building a pathway in our brain and body that helps us to reframe the way that we view enduring adversity and the way that we're able to do that.
Speaker 2:Becoming more resilient is not just a thing that helps us get through difficult circumstances. It also empowers us to grow and adapt along the way. In order to avoid burnout, we must build resilience to our daily stressors and in order to give room to the incoming stressors and more acute stress that is unavoidable in this life. So when we're talking about resilience, it is about planning for setbacks and having tools to use when life doesn't go the way we hope or plan, which is frequent. The ability to recenter and regain focus after a setback instead of focusing on the thing that happened, that we didn't like, the thing that hurt. This is resilience in practice. We cannot control the world or people around us, but we can control how we respond. We can choose how we respond If we have that balance in our nervous system, if we have the space to pause and actually make that choice. So when we are building resistance here at Brain, body Resilience, the way we manage stress and build resilience is built on the mind-body connection and the benefits of exercise, proper breathing techniques on the brain and body Building.
Speaker 2:Resilience is a process that takes practice. It is not a quick fix and there is no finish line. This is a thing that we are doing consistently throughout our lives. So we need to ask ourselves if our thoughts and actions are helping or harming us, because we know that stress is the response to a real or perceived emotional or physical threat, and so if we're looking at our actions and we're looking at our thoughts and we're looking how we're navigating the world, this puts us back in the driver's seat and back in control, and when we feel like what we do matters, that we have a say in what happens and how we feel, we are more resilient. It's like building a muscle. Increasing your resilience takes time and intention, so keeping things in perspective is something that happens with practice, and when we're in a sympathetic, elevated state, it is hard to keep things in perspective because we are focused on survival. Our focus narrows to like what we need in this moment, what we need to survive, what we need to feel better. So how we think plays a significant part in how we feel and how resilient we are when faced with obstacles. When we're working on building resilience, trying to identify areas of irrational thinking, like a tendency to catastrophize the situations in our life or assume that the world is out to get us, this will help us know where we need to pay attention and maybe reshape some of the stories that we're telling.
Speaker 2:Mindfulness as a tool is always a thing that's great because, again, mindfulness just means we're paying attention to what is happening within us, around us, and how we're reacting to those things. So, with mindfulness, we are discovering ways to feel present, focus on what's happening and more deeply experience our lives with things like mindful movement and, yes, even the parts that are uncomfortable or painful, because we don't want to live in those feelings forever. But feelings are meant to be felt and if we are not present to what is what currently exists, we can't direct our response to it. Something that contributes greatly to resilience is our body language, our tone, our facial expressions, because these things all give feedback to your brain about what state you want to be in, what state you are currently in. So pay attention to yourself, what you say, how you hold your body, and remember that your body is always communicating to you and your posture says a lot about how safe your body feels. Are your hands clenched? Are your shoulders up around your ears? Is your jaw clenched? Are you clenching your butt? That's a big one that, when we're stressed out, everything's kind of clenched, and that contributes to a lot of pelvic floor issues. So we need to pay attention to what our body is doing.
Speaker 2:We can also choose and actively seek joy in this practice of building resilience. It is essential for countering stress and building resilience. Even something as small as finding the joy in the pretty little things around you, which, if you see my Instagram, if we're connected over there, you know that I frequently look for the pretty little things, which a lot of the time are like nature, things, flowers and such. You get to decide what pretty little things in your life are, but it's those little pieces of gratitude that help create a buffer, create a little bit of joy, and that goes a long way in building resilience. We have to have the joy piece. It is not less important, it's not something we can just push aside. It is a huge contributor to our ability to be resilient.
Speaker 2:Something else is accepting change, and this one can be really hard. We don't always love this and it is hard. It is difficult because it's uncomfortable. So accepting that change is part of life, accepting circumstances that cannot be changed, can help us focus on the things that we do have the power to change. So much of our stress and discomfort is caused by just refusing to accept what currently exists. We are fighting against the way that we're feeling the thing that's happening, because we don't want it to be that way, and learning to accept that what exists is currently what exists and we can choose how we navigate that and sometimes, yes, we have the power to make changes. That's not always true with things culturally, societally, in the systems that are in place there, things about our environment, sometimes we can't immediately change, but we can change the way that we choose to navigate those things and accept that what currently exists is what we have to be managing.
Speaker 2:A way to deal with all of these things and build resilience is to learn a new skill. This helps to give you a sense of mastery and competency, which helps boost the confidence in your ability. And when we feel confident in our abilities, we build resilience, in a sense that we can actually handle the challenges in life. And saying that I really like is that anxiety is the underestimation of your skills and the overestimation of the threat. The overestimation of the threat and your underestimation of your ability to handle that Um, I just worried about that, but um, anyways, a lack of confidence in your abilities. So learning new skills, new tools to have, help us feel more confident in the ability to handle the thing, which builds resilience, because then we have that reference that we are capable Making social connections, social relationships and support systems play a vital role in building resilience.
Speaker 2:And in a time where we are more connected across the world and have access to people in a different way than we ever have through social media and social connections online, I feel like we are also less connected to each other in a genuine and significant way in our lives. If you think about when you go out into the world, a lot of us, like, put headphones on. When I'm on my commute every day, every I pay attention to just how many people are staring at their phone with headphones, in which is almost everyone, so that you don't have to talk to people, so that you don't have to be bothered, so that you don't have the discomfort of being around strangers. And this does not lend to community building, it does not lend to social relationships or the possibility of connection. So we need to be thinking about that and it's difficult in a time where that's just not something we are doing, it's not something that's supportive and our culture is kind of drifted away from that sense of community in general.
Speaker 2:And when we are looking to build resilience moving on, the basics always work. Think about the basics. They are our baseline, our body and brain need sleep, you need movement, you need hydration, you need nutrition to function well. You need all these things. If we are worn down, without the proper building blocks, building resilience is going to be really hard and not the priority for you in survival mode. So we're looking at taking some of these things not all of them, but focus on one at a time. Give practice, start small in the little things that are outside of your comfort zone, so we can practice a little bit of stress, but give time for growth. Practice in these areas is the only way to build resilience to the discomfort that we face from new things, and then we can move forward.
Speaker 2:That's it for today. I challenge you to pick one of these things that we've talked about in this episode and focus on that every day for the week. Just the one, and again, baby steps. If you found this episode useful again, please do share it with a friend so they might also find it useful. You know that I'm grateful for your time and attention and two of your most precious resources and you choose to share them here with me, and I am profoundly grateful for that. We will do this again Until next week. I am wishing you a beautiful week. I'm out of here.